


human remains

by Vnutrenni



Category: Johannes Cabal - Jonathan L. Howard
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-20
Updated: 2010-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 21:38:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/141987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vnutrenni/pseuds/Vnutrenni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Horst finds that the vivid sights and sounds of the midway are not exactly as he remembers them. Unfortunately, it's not just because the carnival is possessed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	human remains

**Author's Note:**

  * For [novembersmith](https://archiveofourown.org/users/novembersmith/gifts).



It was late afternoon when the sun blinked sleepily behind an iron cloud.

Horst woke from no dreams, none at all, thinking that there must have been an explosion and that it probably came from Johannes’ room. If that was the case, there would be fire and calamity and all manner of escaped lab rats running around being terrifically good at foiling their former captor’s attempts to recover them. That was the natural order of things: Johannes drafted an experiment and then Johannes blew himself up. Even at what-could-possess-a-decent-person-to-be-awake o’clock, Horst wouldn’t miss a chance to stroll through the fallout so he pushed off his blankets and rose from his bed. Or started to rise. Tried again. Couldn’t get up. Knuckles struck wood. Locked in a box.

A casket.

In fact, he realized suddenly, he was in an antique jam cupboard. _In fact_ , he was in an antique cherry wood jam cupboard with detailing in bird’s eye veneer. It happened that this cupboard had once been owned by a devoted practictioner of black magicks adapted from seiðr -- which, while not inherently evil, was kind of obscure and therefore very cliquey -- and had served as her personal sensory deprivation device as well as a place to store baked goods; but he only knew that because he’d found a registration-for-cursed-standing docket crumpled in a hidden panel of the lid. It had never been approved. Considering the cupboard’s latest nefarious function, Horst felt vaguely inclined to update the form with “vampire’s flophouse” and send it back to Hell.

Inside, the wood smelled of cracked varnish and stale confectioner’s sugar. Horst lay quietly within it, concentrating on the individual forces exerted on his body by the slight weight of his clothing, by the panting forward momentum of the train, by the slow, inexorable rotation of the earth. While he did not like to be so aware of so many things at once, he didn’t know how to ignore any of it. Sleep seemed like the easiest escape, but it was difficult to sleep through the full span of daylight knowing that the sky was on fire just behind two inches of centuries-old wood. He supposed that he would get better at it with practice. Of course, since he didn’t intend to make peace with the situation, he saw very little use in _practicing_ anything. Tucked away from the mercenary sun, Horst counted the degrees left in its descent and passed the time by listening.

The sounds he heard in his immediate vicinity could only be Johannes; the closed and curtained car they shared was forbidden ground for the rest of the crew, Management Only. It didn’t even take any protective wards -- though Johannes insisted on casting them anyway -- or particularly elaborate threats to enforce this rule. It was just the way he said it, the way he _looked_ when he said it: Management. Only. Thinking about the sheer range of his brother’s murderous expressions, Horst laughed softly and then heard Johannes go still nearby, heard every flicker of his muscles, heard fingertips spread against desktop, heard body sink into leather chair, heard pulse increase and clumsy human senses reach wide, groping for proof of a whisper, finding nothing, slithering away; so human, Horst thought wistfully. So human.

Johannes was very still for a very long time, but then that wasn’t entirely unusual. Once -- when Horst again lay awake and listening -- Johannes stayed in one place for hours, neither reading nor writing, the pace of his heart and breath slowing to icy minimums. Once, for that matter, he walked back and forth ceaselessly from noon to nightfall like a child’s clockwork doll, wound up until the brass wires were squealing indignantly.

Once, when he truly must have believed that Horst was asleep, he went to the cupboard and sat down beside it.

Once, he sighed.

For his own part, Horst was not sure what to make of all that he overheard. In his boyhood, he’d entertained the standard fantasies of being a spy, privy to guarded information and wonderfully destructive toys. He actually would have expected to delight in his present faculties -- even the thing where he drank blood and hid from daylight; boys were twisted, really -- but there was no getting around the fact that it just ... wasn’t fun. He heard everything, and his ears rang and his head hurt. He saw everything, and it only made him want to look away. All the finer nuances he picked up on people spoke of their pain or fear or weakness and the part of him that _leaped_ on those things with a startling, crooked grin was a creature he had come to know very well. It was hungry and cruel and it thought quite highly of itself. Horst didn’t like it. Always sidling closer, trying to get inside so that it could stay forever. He didn’t like it at all, certainly not now that it had taken such a shine to Johannes’ infernal carnival.

Further down the train, held tight in a cast-iron belly where the stink of sulfur was always growing, the separate components of the rig were packed for travel, poles over canvas, a thousand supposedly inanimate objects chattering mindlessly through the red choke and grumble of the boiler from the bottomless pit. Voices hung on hooked tongues. There were limbs turning on too many joints, and there was frictionless sliding flesh, and there was toxic laughter. There were terrible things. Horst was offended by the existence of it all and felt a little childish for his revulsion, knowing what Johannes would say about it. Or, actually, he had no idea what Johannes would say because he tended to use some truly ridiculous words just for the sake of using them; but he knew what he would think.

since you are also a monster they should not bother you why do you always have to be so judgemental

(Because you’ve been playing with monsters for a long time. Because you like playing with them so much. Because you make them for no reason out of people who can’t refuse you, and even now I’m not sure what you’re doing to yourself, Johannes, I don’t know. Your own soul, spent like currency, your soul.)

The sun in the sky, like a burning clock, banked to dusk. Johannes stood up, walked to the cupboard and knocked on it politely.

Horst closed his eyes.

  
  


✖

  
  


Throughout the expanding catalogue of its scheduled stops, the Cabal Bros. Carnival was developing a reputation that wasn’t half as bad as it really deserved. Then again, most of the ticketholders didn’t know the half of what they were getting themselves into, so Horst felt like there must be some appropriately demonic common denominator between evil intent and ignorance and they were just solving for hostile idiots. Managing the front end, he found that the trick was not to impress people but rather to avoid impressing them too much. They lined up to glimpse creatures from the bowels of the abyss, except they couldn’t know that the creatures were genuine. Nobody would _pay_ to go to Hell. So his purpose in Johannes’ employ was, as ever, to protect people from things they wouldn’t understand. Things like the walking dead and temptation made flesh and even Johannes in a foul mood. That last was probably the hardest to explain away and the best way to go about doing it was to keep Johannes out of his depth at all times.

Horst spent a lot of time shadowing his brother, literally hiding under the loose flap of human perception by starlight, watching and mediating. Every time Johannes seemed to be drawing near to a truly unforgivable decision, Horst gave him something more immediate to chew on. It was, in some ways, a test of Johannes’ priorities, one that measured him against an abstract scale of his own determination to do horrible things and gave him the opportunity to -- well, not repent, but to not do horrible things after all.

The night was warm and humid with the weight of a crowd. Pandering to all expectations, the carnival set up in the half-light of dusk and was running on red light come full darkness. People came from quiet townhouses to wander between the concessions and the act wagons and stare discreetly, never realizing that they were themselves being closely watched. Johannes often skulked around the sideshow, standing in crushed clover and field grass like a lean lion eyeing herds of prey. As he began to angle himself toward a young man who did not smell of any notable sin, Horst emerged at his shoulder and whispered sharply: “The Sharktopus is loose.”

With glorious, unexpected elegance, Johannes spun to face him. “ _What?_ ”

“I said the Sharktopus is loose, and I thought you would want to know before things got out of hand.”

“I don’t hear anything,” Johannes murmured but he was listening, straining to listen, and his blood was sweetening with something very much like fear. “It’s not going to go on a _rampage_ , if that’s what you’re thinking. I'll have you know I don’t make uncouth constructs.”

Dennis and Denzil chose just that moment to amble by, drooling glassy syllables into the flattened grass. Watching them pass, Johannes eyes lost focus slightly.

“It was sniffing around the Dalmation Boy’s set-up last I saw,” Horst supplied.

“I’ll be back,” Johannes snapped and peeled away into the night like he’d caught the scent of disaster.

With supreme satisfaction, Horst settled back out of perception. Johannes became a trail of black ink winding off around and among the soft shapes of strangers; his mark, unaware of having been in danger, loitered in a ghostly circle of breath and body heat and floating skin cells before he finally drifted toward the midway on the breeze of a whim. Out of an odd, impersonal sort of affection, Horst followed him casually, inhabiting the angles and textures that no human eye could see, walking only where footprints had already been pressed into the damp earth.

It was a frightening sight, the midway. Lights moved like comet tails in the long cosmos, like ice melting incandescent down an inevitable path to the sea. Engines were snarling hungrily and the rides were lashing out with wings and tails, heaving children into the air, catching them, shaking them inside cages, leering at Horst as if to say: _when we drop them, maybe we will let you lick their little faces off the ground._

No one else sees these apparitions knitting burning webs overhead, no one falters or runs. If any man, woman or child tips back their head, it’s not to scream but to smile. The old wonderment. Horst actually remembered it with some clarity, that absent gladness to be alive. They were taking it for granted, he could taste it on them. He could taste it.

There were a thousand small round bulbs cresting the rigging and scaffolds, they chittered and blinked golden messages at him in parasite code: _feed us feed us feed us feed us._

“These people are not yours,” Horst said. His smile felt keen and cold in his mouth, a piece of metal, a strip of midnight. “You are the Cabal Brothers’ Travelling Carnival, and you need one of us to give them to you.”

Hot beyond imagining, the carnival breathed on him, a steady sigh of impatience.

It seemed likely, Horst decided, that there had been a minor mistake; Johannes used a different key, changed the threshold, released him into the oceanic open spaces of the wrong world somehow. A world where lights moved like comet tails and people walked around stinking of blood and their blood smelled like cinnamon wrapped in blueberry pancakes on Christmas morning.

The lights winked at him, they said: _same as always_.

“We do not have,” Johannes said, and Horst was startled until it occurred to him that he had bled absently into tangible grip of the crowd, wanting to be surrounded, “a Sharktopus.”

“That’s awful news. I was sure we did.”

“We don’t.”

It was a word Horst had grabbed under pressure. He frowned elaborately, then snapped his fingers. “It’s the thing under your bed.”

“The thing you told me was under my bed,” Johannes amended, his eyes catlike and gleaming.

“Ages ago.” Something as sticky as caramel corn rolled against Horst’s skin; he glanced around and saw that it was the nearness of a pretty woman and her laughter. “One day you started not listening to me and I see you’ve only been getting better at it.”

Johannes sighed deeply, an echo of the carnival’s frustration. “Would you please just go and ... be devious?”

“I don’t need to go anywhere to do that.”

“ _Horst_ ,” he began, but stopped short when Horst raised his hand.

“Johannes,” Horst retorted. He intended to be cruel, then made the mistake of looking his brother in the eye. “Look. The world is full of hellbound people and I like to think that you aren’t one of them. And yet. If you polish an old set of rails with a demonic travelling carnival, those people are going to come to you. Do you understand me? Stop trying to identify the ill and the weak of spirit. They’re lost to themselves, but they’re not lost causes. I want you to let them have a chance. Take the ones who’ve damned themselves. Please just do that.”

They stood side by side while the midway drooled glowing greed down on the world. Though it might have been Horst’s imagination, he thought that Johannes seemed to see it.

“I suppose I could collect a few of those,” Johannes said slowly.

“And just stop acting like a big game hunter about all of this, it’s unnerving.”

“I am _not_ acting like a -- ”

Horst had not left him but he appeared, from Johannes’ point of view, to scatter in face of night like a handful of ashes. Exasperated, Johannes glared straight through Horst for a time, then checked around himself half-heartedly for signs of movement. Saw nothing. Knew he could not do anything more and stepped out into the flow of foot traffic with the air of a man balancing on the edge of a cliff. In his wake, the carnival quivered like muscles under skin. It sneered electricity, it called after him: _witches float in water, so do human corpses; mothers drown your daughters, and find out what remorse is._

"Ha," Horst said aloud. "You don't know the first thing about him. He hates witches and doesn't believe in poetry as a valid form of communication."

There was a wonderful moment of thoughtful, unbroken silence under the genial rabble of humanity and then -- so suddenly that the great gasp of the crowd seemed to come first -- the power shut off and there was only petulant darkness.

  
  


✖

  


"That was," Johannes said, "a customer service _nightmare_."

They were breaking down in the dark hours of morning, packing to be back on the rails by sunrise. Hardly three hours of legitimate business had been done, and not a single soul was collected. Good news for anyone in these parts who wasn't in the employ of Hell, Horst supposed.

The cause of the blackout still hadn't become fully apparent. Johannes had everyone, construct or no, running to determine the problem. It was amazing to witness, really; half the part-time union of infernal workers gnashing their teeth at each other while they loaded tents onto train cars, the other half literally sniffing the dirt as if expecting to scent a specific intruder. Horst could have tried to explain, but figured it would be more time-effective to let them lose interest on their own.

"You could have just refunded their money and they would have gone away," Horst reminded him.

"If I lay claim to no soul," Johannes said grimly, "I will take their next dearest possession."

"That is just bleak."

"It's the world we live in, Horst."

"Don't even start with me with _the world we live in_ , I'm only just back in it. Have a little empathy."

With a surprisingly prim _tsk_ , Johannes turned and levelled his eyebrows at him. "I didn't mean it like that."

"Too soon, Johannes."

"You're a prat," Johannes said, and Horst let him glimpse his smile but only for an instant.

The eastern horizon was turning a sickly grey when Bones approached them, a shuffling slip of skin over bone in the hollows of the empty field. "Don't know what happen, but Jenny the one who do it. She mad. Boss, you gonna want to talk to her before next jump on the line or this whole show is gonna be the dark match."

"To the _generator?_ " Johannes said in disbelief.

"Yeah, Boss."

Johannes looked to Horst for support, and Horst shrugged, reluctant to pass judgement. The sun was coming up, he could hear it clicking its teeth in the back of his head, so he was going to miss whatever happened. So, whatever happened, it would likely be unspeakably amusing.

"It couldn't hurt," he said at last.

" _You_ not done see Jenny much yet, Mister Horst," Bones said ominously and started shuffling away, looking back often enough that Johannes finally made a strange pneumatic hissing noise and went after him.

It was, Horst thought idly, something to note, anyway. Jenny the disgruntled generator. Worth looking into, but not immediately. Sunlight was leering on mountain peaks far away and far too close. Horst wound around demons, seeing their true forms and knowing by their expressions that they could see his as well. He walked from the trampled field to the compressed gravel around the railroad tracks, refusing to hurry himself. When he was young, walking up the stairs at night used to give him a thrill of terror, he used to feel with certainty that there was something behind him, waiting to snatch him with claws, waiting to drag him down and down, but he never ran.

He climbed into the car he shared with Johannes -- Management Only -- and walked to the antique jam cupboard. He didn't run. He looked around at the world as if he would never see it again. He climbed into the cupboard, heard the carnival screeching and jeering and matching unwieldy rhymes where it was locked in darkness. He sealed himself away from the sun and waited for his brother to wake him from no dreams at all.


End file.
